I had been reading an excellent dissertation of Krueger's upon the old
vulgar error which regards the space from one earth and sun to another
as empty. Our sun together with all its planets fills only the
31,419,460,000,000,000th part of the whole space between itself and the
next solar body. Gracious Heavens! thought I,--in what an unfathomable
abyss of emptiness were this universe swallowed up and lost, if all
were void and utter vacuity except the few shining points of dust which
we call a planetary system! To conceive of our earthly ocean as the
abode of death, and essentially incapable of life, and of its populous
islands as being no greater than snail-shells, would be a far less
error in proportion to the compass of our planet than that which
attributes emptiness to the great mundane spaces: and the error would
be far less if the marine animals were to ascribe life and fulness
exclusively to the sea, and to regard the atmospheric ocean above them
as empty and untenanted. According to Herschel, the most remote of the
galaxies which the telescope discovers lie at such a distance from us,
that their light, which reaches us at this day, must have set out on
its journey two millions of years ago; and thus by optical laws it is
possible that whole squadrons of the starry hosts may be now reaching
us with their beams which have themselves perished ages ago. Upon this
scale of computation for the dimensions of the world, what heights and
depths and breadths must there be in this universe--in comparison of
which the positive universe would be itself a nihility, were it
crossed--pierced--and belted about by so illimitable a wilderness of
nothing! But is it possible that any man can for a moment overlook
those vast forces which must pervade these imaginary deserts with
eternal surges of flux and reflux, to make the very paths to those
distant starry coasts voyageable to our eyes? Can you lock up in a sun
or in its planets their reciprocal forces of attraction? Does not the
light stream through the immeasurable spaces between our earth and the
nebula which is farthest removed from us? And in this stream of light
there is as ample an existence of the positive, and as much a home for
the abode of a spiritual world, as there is a dwelling-place for thy
own spirit in the substance of the brain. To these and similar
reflections succeeded the following dream:--
Methought my body sank down in ruins, and my inner form stepped out
apparelled in light: and by my-side there stood another form which
resembled my own, except that it did not shine like mine, but lightened
unceasingly. "Two thoughts," said the form, "are the wings with which I
move; the thought of _Here_, and the thought of _There_. And behold! I
am yonder";--pointing to a distant world. "Come, then, and wait on me
with thy thoughts and with thy flight, that I may show to thee the
universe under a veil." And I flew along with the Form. In a moment our
earth fell back, behind our consuming flight, into an abyss of
distance; a faint gleam only was reflected from the summits of the
Cordilleras; and a few moments more reduced the sun to a little star;
and soon there remained nothing visible of our system except a comet
which was travelling from our sun with angelic speed in the direction
of Sirius. Our flight now carried us so rapidly through the flocks
of solar bodies--flocks, past counting unless to their heavenly
Shepherd,--that scarcely could they expand themselves before us into
the magnitude of moons, before they sank behind us into pale nebular
gleams; and their planetary earths could not reveal themselves for a
moment to the transcendent rapidity of our course. At length Sirius and
all the brotherhood of our constellations and the galaxy of our heavens
stood far below our feet as a little nebula amongst other yet more
distant nebulae. Thus we flew on through the starry wildernesses: one
heaven after another unfurled its immeasurable banners before us, and
then rolled up behind us: galaxy behind galaxy towered up into solemn
altitudes before which the spirit shuddered; and they stood in long
array through which the Infinite Being might pass in progress.
Sometimes the Form that lightened would outfly my weary thoughts; and
then it would be seen far off before me like a coruscation amongst the
stars--till suddenly I thought again to myself the thought of _There_,
and then I was at its side. But, as we were thus swallowed up by one
abyss of stars after another, and the heavens above our eyes were not
emptier--neither were the heavens below them fuller; and as suns
without intermission fell into the solar ocean like water-spouts of a
storm which fall into the ocean of waters;--then at length the human
heart within me was overburdened and weary, and yearned after some
narrow cell or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the
universe. And I said to the Form at my side, "O Spirit! has then this
universe no end?" And the Form answered and said, "Lo! it has no
beginning."
Suddenly, however, the heavens above us appeared to be emptied, and not
a star was seen to twinkle in the mighty abyss,--no gleam of light to
break the unity of the infinite darkness. The starry hosts behind us
had all contracted into an obscure nebula: and at length _that_ also
had vanished. And I thought to myself, "At last the universe has
ended": and I trembled at the thought of the illimitable dungeon of
pure,--pure darkness which here began to imprison the creation: I
shuddered at the dead sea of nothing, in whose unfathomable zone of
blackness the jewel of the glittering universe seemed to be set and
buried forever; and through the night in which we moved I saw the Form
which still lightened as before, but left all around it unilluminated.
Then the Form said to me in my anguish, "O creature of little faith!
Look up! the most ancient light is coming!" I looked; and in a moment
came a twilight,--in the twinkling of an eye a galaxy,--and then with a
choral burst rushed in all the company of stars. For centuries gray
with age, for millennia hoary with antiquity, had the starry light been
on its road to us; and at length out of heights inaccessible to thought
it had reached us. Now then, as through some renovated century, we flew
through new cycles of heavens. At length again came a starless
interval; and far longer it endured, before the beams of a starry host
again had reached us.
As we thus advanced forever through an interchange of nights and solar
heavens, and as the interval grew still longer and longer before the
last heaven we had quitted contracted to a point,--and as once we
issued suddenly from the middle of thickest night into an Aurora
Borealis,--the herald of an expiring world, and we found throughout
this cycle of solar systems that a day of judgment had indeed arrived;
the suns had sickened, and the planets were heaving--rocking, yawning
in convulsions, the subterraneous waters of the great deeps were
breaking up, and lightnings that were ten diameters of a world in
length ran along--from east to west--from Zenith to Nadir; and here and
there, where a sun should have been, we saw instead through the misty
vapor a gloomy--ashy--leaden corpse of a solar body, that sucked in
flames from the perishing world--but gave out neither light nor heat;
and as I saw, through a vista which had no end, mountain towering above
mountain, and piled up with what seemed glittering snow from the
conflict of solar and planetary bodies;--then my spirit bent under the
load of the universe, and I said to the Form, "Rest, rest: and lead me
no farther: I am too solitary in the creation itself; and in its
deserts yet more so: the full world is great, but the empty world is
greater; and with the universe increase its Zaarahs."
Then the Form touched me like the flowing of a breath, and spoke more
gently than before: "In the presence of God there is no emptiness:
above, below, between, and round about the stars, in the darkness and
in the light, dwelleth the true and very Universe, the sum and fountain
of all that is. But thy spirit can bear only earthly images of the
unearthly; now then I cleanse thy sight with euphrasy; look forth, and
behold the images." Immediately my eyes were opened; and I looked, and
I saw as it were an interminable sea of light,--sea immeasurable, sea
unfathomable, sea without a shore. All spaces between all heavens were
filled with happiest light: and there was a thundering of floods: and
there were seas above the seas, and seas below the seas: and I saw all
the trackless regions that we had voyaged over: and my eye comprehended
the farthest and the nearest: and darkness had become light, and the
light darkness: for the deserts and wastes of the creation were now
filled with the sea of light, and in this sea the suns floated like
ash-gray blossoms, and the planets like black grains of seed. Then my
heart comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces between the
worlds, and death only amongst the worlds. Upon all the suns there
walked upright shadows in the form of men: but they were glorified when
they quitted these perishable worlds, and when they sank into the sea
of light: and the murky planets, I perceived, were but cradles for the
infant spirits of the universe of light. In the Zaarahs of the creation
I saw--I heard--I felt--the glittering--the echoing--the breathing of
life and creative power. The suns were but as spinning-wheels, the
planets no more than weavers' shuttles, in relation to the infinite web
which composes the veil of Isis; which veil is hung over the whole
creation, and lengthens as any finite being attempts to raise it. And
in sight of this immeasurability of life, no sadness could endure; but
only joy that knew no limit, and happy prayers.
But in the midst of this great vision of the Universe the Form that
lightened eternally had become invisible, or had vanished to its home
in the unseen world of spirits: I was left alone in the centre of a
universe of life, and I yearned after some sympathizing being. Suddenly
from the starry deeps there came floating through the ocean of light a
planetary body; and upon it there stood a woman whose face was as the
face of a Madonna; and by her side there stood a child, whose
countenance varied not--neither was it magnified as he drew nearer.
This child was a king, for I saw that he had a crown upon his head: but
the crown was a crown of thorns. Then also I perceived that the
planetary body was our unhappy earth: and, as the earth drew near, this
child who had come forth from the starry deeps to comfort me threw upon
me a look of gentlest pity and of unutterable love--so that in my heart
I had a sudden rapture of joy such as passes all understanding; and I
awoke in the tumult of my happiness.
I awoke: but my happiness survived my dream: and I exclaimed, O how
beautiful is death, seeing that we die in a world of life and of
creation without end! and I blessed God for my life upon earth, but
much more for the life in those unseen depths of the universe which are
emptied of all but the Supreme Reality, and where no earthly life nor
perishable hope can enter.